KOEPP'S CORNER: PREMIUM RUSHHOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE READER'S PICS FROM NYC SHOOTDavid Koepp is currently shooting a new movie, Premium Rush, in New York City. The other day, Hollywood Elsewhere posted two pictures of the New York shoot sent in by a reader of that site, Eran Evron. The film, which was written by Koepp and his longtime creative partner John Kamps, involves a New York City bike messenger (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, pictured on the far right) who is pursued by a dirty cop (played by Michael Shannon, in the center of the picture wearing a tie). Dania Ramirez (wearing a blue top in the photo) plays a fellow bike messenger. Koepp is wearing a red ball cap, all the way on the left side of the photo. Premium Rush will be released on January 13, 2012. About a month ago, Gordon-Levitt posted a video on his site, that was shot by Koepp himself, showing the bloody arm he got from crashing into the back of a cab during filming. Gordon-Levitt wrote, "My first real wreck today. Busted through the rear window of a cab. Luckily got my elbows up. Coulda been way worse. No, but it was my fault, I was going too fast. The director, Dave Koepp, was extremely concerned for my well-being, but I made him RECord the wound. Anyway, Premium Rush is gonna be awesome. Gratuitous ER footage to follow, stay tuned…" A few more set pics of Gordon-Levitt and Ramirez can be seen at Accidental Sexiness

MI4'S WORKING TITLE IS ARIESBetween Variety and Deadline Hollywood last week, we found out that Paramount is "rebooting" the Mission: Impossible franchise with the fourth installment. Jeremy Renner has been cast as partner spy agent to Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt, with an eye toward Renner taking over as the lead in future MI films. Brad Bird is directing, and the word is that the fourth film will not be called "Mission: Impossible 4." Now, Production Weekly has a listing for a film called "Aries (aka Mission: Impossible 4)." Meanwhile, several actresses are being tested for the female lead, according to another Deadline Hollywood post. The film will open in December of 2011.

ITALIAN FILMMAKER CLAIMS HE'S REMAKING SCARFACESTARRING FABRIZIO CORONA; SAYS PARIS HILTON ONE OF SEVERAL "VYING FOR" ELVIRA ROLEItalian film blogs have been abuzz the past week and a half over rumors that Massimo Emilio Gobbi, who appeared in Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (which was partly about characters influenced by Brian De Palma's Scarface), is already filming a remake of Scarface. CINEblog.it's Dr. Apocalypse got ahold of Gobbi himself, who confirmed that he has already started shooting the film, and that it stars the controversial paparazzo Fabrizio Corona, a scandalous Italian figure whose Italian Wikipedia page reads like an FBI rap sheet full of counterfeit bills, bankruptcy fraud, allegations of extortion, prison, and an assault on an officer. Corona has more recently appeared on a reality TV show and in a documentary film by Erik Gandini, Videocracy - Basta Apparire. Gobbi tells Dr. Apocalypse, "Corona is simply perfect for the role of Scarface. He's an actor who is undeniably difficult to manage and I think I'm one of the few who can do it."

As for the film itself, Gobbi is referring to it as Scarface 2010 even though he does not plan to have it completed for at least a couple more years. Dr. Apocalypse asks Gobbi about the idea going around that he does not complete films, after having announced at the Venice Film Festival last year that he was making a Mafia film called Kamorrah Days. Gobbi explained that that film's original director indulged in exaggerated costs, after which Gobbi rewrote the script and shot the "experimental" film digitally, finally releasing it on home video. In any case, Gobbi tells Dr. Apocalypse that he wants Scarface 2010 to be a contemporary movie. Gobbi, who is said to have written the screenplay, has been quoted as saying, "Tony Montana in the third millennium will prefer the handling of embryonic cells rather than drug trafficking. The gang will be Italian American and not Cuban." Which, of course, sort of brings the whole thing back around full circle to its origins, but with Al Pacino's Cuban gangster as a huge influence.

When asked about the rumors that Paris Hilton and others are in talks to take on the Elvira role, Gobbi replied, "There are several actresses vying for that role. Brigitta Bulgari, Paris Hilton and Naomi [who-- Naomi Campbell?]. At the moment we have not decided yet." However, since filming has apparently already begun, Dr. Apocalypse wonders how they will fit this character in when the role hasn't even been cast yet. Gobbi replies that with nobody running behind him chasing the money for the film, he has no deadline and "no obligations for the return of capital. If Francis Ford Coppola was unduly with Apocalypse Now, using three years to complete it, I can do it myself... So I can also take two years, the important thing is to be able to finish it."

TOYER TALKA BRIEF LOOK AT THIS UPCOMING PROJECTAs I wrote last week, Brian De Palma has been thinking about ways to film Toyer since at least 2002, when he indicated that he "had an idea to make a very scary movie, based on a kind of serial murderer that preys on tourists." Later that year, Le Paradis' Carl Rodrigue & Tony Suppa interviewed De Palma and asked him about Toyer. De Palma explained:

This is material based on a book and a play by Gardner McKay called TOYER [De Palma later stressed that his film was based on the play, and not the book]. People have been trying to do it for decades. It's a very intensive psychodrama between two characters, but no one's figured out how to open it up and make it work as a movie. I got an idea how to do it, and I pulled it off the shelf last year and adapted it. It took us quite a while to obtain the rights to the material because Gardner died last year and we had to deal with his estate and his widow. Finally, we were able to work out a deal. It's a very terrifying piece of material. It's been terrifying for over thirty years...

De Palma had taken McKay's play and expanded it, adding De Palma touches such as flashbacks that repeated certain scenes from different perspectives, newly invented characters, and locations to provide set pieces for a true blue De Palma film.

In 2005-2006, as post-production work was being done on The Black Dahlia, there were rumored to be plans to shoot Toyer in Venice, Paris, and London. One new character is an English surgeon named Laura Manning, and it had been rumored in 2004 that Tilda Swinton was in talks for that role. With the various settings, of course, an international cast was planned, and Giancarlo Giannini had been rumored for the role of the Italian Inspector Scarlatti. With a four/five-year gap since the project was last considered, the casting has started anew, and it will be interesting to see who fills out some of these roles this Fall.

DON'T LOOK NOW & DONAGGIOAs noted earlier, De Palma had planned to have Pino Donaggio compose the score for Toyer, and I suspect that will still be the plan. Donaggio also scored Nicolas Roeg's Venice-set thriller Don't Look Now in 1973. De Palma briefly discussed Don't Look Now in 2002 with Rodrigue and Suppa. "I love the way Roeg shot Venice in that period," De Palma said. "I always wanted to shoot a movie in Venice in the winter."

THIERRY ARBOGAST, DANTE FERRETTIAlso in 2005-2006, Thierry Arbogast was set to be the cinematographer on Toyer, and Dante Ferretti, having just worked with De Palma on The Black Dahlia, was getting ready to jump onto the Toyer project, as well. Hopefully this dream team is still available... Incidentally, Ferretti will be honored at next month's Venice Film Festival. On the morning of September 10th, Ferretti will receive the Premio Bianchi prior to the premiere of Gianfranco Giagni's hour-long documentary, Dante Ferretti: Production Designer. The film will then be shown on Italian TV in October.

MOVIE GEEKS EXAMINE "THE DE PALMA THRILLER"TRIBUTE TO DE PALMA LEADS UP TO 70TH BIRTHDAYBrian De Palma will turn 70 on September 11th, and Movie Geeks United! is preparing a fantastic-looking slate of shows that week leading up to the occasion, with a rich line-up of special guests. The guests are still being added, but here is what they have so far:

The De Palma Thriller: BLOW OUT - Thursday, September 9 at 10pm EST featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, and producer George Litto, with additional insights from cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.

Producer Scott Steindorff tells De Palma a la Mod that there is a new cast now in talks for Toyer. This was in response to my question of whether or not they are still talking with Juliette Binoche and Colin Firth about the lead roles in the upcoming film. It looks like we can expect to see some news of a new cast in the upcoming weeks. Steindorff also confirmed for me that Brian De Palma is the sole writer of the screenplay adaptation (so the long-ago unsubstantiated rumor of a Ted Tally revision was probably never true).

When I talked to De Palma in Paris in 2002, he told me that he "had an idea to make a very scary movie, based on a kind of serial murderer that preys on tourists." In later months, it was announced that he would be filming an adaptation of Gardner McKay's Toyer with producer Tarak Ben-Ammar, and it always seemed to me that this must have been the film De Palma had been referring to. "A kind of serial murderer" is different than saying "a serial murderer," and seems close to the premise of Toyer, which is about a serial killer who does not actually kill his victims, but has the surgical skill to lobotomize them. Hence, "a kind of serial murderer." There was also a rumor around 2004 that De Palma had planned to cast famous actresses in cameo roles as Toyer's victims (or should we say, Venice "tourists"?). This would be one obvious alteration to the original one act play, which has only two characters.

When De Palma said in the quote above that he "had an idea," part of that idea was undoubtedly visual. As he explained in the same interview, "you know, now you go through a process of reading a lot of material, books, scripts, writing… until you get something that’s going to get you interested enough to make the movie. And as you get older, it just gets harder. And you say, do I want to spend all this time making something I’m not really a hundred percent sure that it’s going to be moving what I’m doing another step. You know, 'What am I saying with this movie? Am I involving some kind of cinematic idea I’m working on?'" With Toyer, which he has tried to get off the ground repeatedly, it is a safe bet that De Palma feels he will be working out some new cinematic ideas.

DE PALMA TO MAKE TOYER AFTER ALLTHRILLER TO SHOOT IN VENICE LATE FALL, EARLY WINTERClaude Brodesser-Akner at New York Magazine's Vulture posted an exclusive item Friday announcing that Brian De Palma will be heading to Venice late this fall to begin shooting Toyer, a project he has been wanting to do since at least 2002. The film will shoot from late fall into early winter, according to Vulture. De Palma's screenplay for Toyer, which he adapted from the one act play by Gardner McKay (not from McKay's later novel of the same name), has been in the control of Tarak Ben-Ammar all this time. Ben-Ammar worked with De Palma on Femme Fatale, a film in which De Palma was able to follow his muse and create a stunning work of profound brilliance. As of 2006, De Palma had Juliette Binoche and Colin Firth on board to play the two leads in Toyer, and each had said they were just waiting for De Palma to be ready to film. (About the long delay, Firth had quipped that perhaps he would play Toyer's grandfather.) De Palma's adaptation is set in Venice during the winter, with a set-piece designed to take place during the Carnevale di Venezia. Part of the challenge initially seemed to be getting permission to film during the Carnival, which takes place in February and March. Scott Steindorff, who is now aboard the project as a producer, tells Vulture that it would be logistically impossible to shoot during the Carnival itself, and so they plan to re-create the Carnival on location.

"I READ THE SCRIPT-- IT'S REALLY FRICKIN' SCARY"There was a report somewhere along the line that Ted Tally had also done some work on De Palma's script adaptation, but that has never been confirmed. In any case, Steindorff tells Vulture that De Palma's adaptation of Toyer "has all the elements of suspense that Brian does so well in films like Blow Out and Carrie. And by that I mean, it's really frickin' scary: I read the script on a plane, and I was still terrified." The Vulture post adds that "Steindorff has brought heavyweight literature like Philip Roth's The Human Stain and Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera to the screen." (Steindorff also produced the suspenseful horror film Turistas.) Brodesser-Akner also notes that De Palma's film should be creepy, as it is set against the Carnival "for which elaborate masks disguising one's identity are traditionally worn on the street from St. Stephen's Day (the day after Christmas) until the start of the Venitian Carnival (two weeks before Ash Wednesday)."

Pino Donaggio had mentioned around 2004 that he had been asked by De Palma to write the score for Toyer, something he said he was looking forward to. In a 2008 interview with Joep de Bruijn at MainTitles, Donaggio said, "And of course I would have liked to do all other films by Brian De Palma. He keeps on changing composers, but there is still something out there. He came to Venice to talk to me about The Toyer. After that meeting The Black Dahlia followed and another one. I don't know, I'll wait for it."

JENNIFER SALT, BIG-TIME SCREENWRITEREAT, PRAY, LOVE ADAPTED FROM ELIZABETH GILBERT MEMOIRJennifer Salt is the co-screenwriter on the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, which opens in theaters today. Salt wrote the screenplay with the film's director, Ryan Murphy, the creator of the TV series Nip/Tuck and Glee. Salt was a regular writer and co-producer for Nip/Tuck.

Salt, of course, is a staple of the early films of Brian De Palma, having appeared in his first feature length project, The Wedding Party, in 1963 (released in 1969), which was made while both attended Sarah Lawrence College (according to Brooks Barnes at the New York Times, De Palma and Salt briefly dated during this time). In 1964, De Palma made a short film about her called Jennifer, and Salt subsequently appeared in De Palma's Murder a la Mod, Hi, Mom!, and Sisters, the latter having been imagined by De Palma specifically with her and Margot Kidder in mind to play the leads. She also appeared in a film written by her late father, Waldo Salt, 1969's Midnight Cowboy, which costarred her then-boyfriend Jon Voight (Salt would appear in one more film with Voight, Paul Williams' The Revolutionary, released the same year as the similarly-themed Hi, Mom!). Salt told Backstage's Jenelle Riley that her father had originally thought of a small role for her in Midnight Cowboy, but that role became bigger when she met with director John Schlesinger. Barnes' New York Times article, which features quotes from De Palma, briefly discusses this early part of Salt's career:

The early 1970s found [Salt] living (and partying) in Malibu, Calif., with Margot Kidder, who would go on to play Lois Lane in three “Superman” films. Drawn by Ms. Salt’s cooking and both women’s tendency to sunbathe topless were some dudes: Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg. (“To see those pale city boys running around on the beach with no clothes on was so charming,” Ms. Salt recalled. Said Mr. De Palma, “She cooked so well she could get us to do almost anything.”)

Salt went into television, acting for a long time on the TV series Soap before becoming disillusioned with it all, and eventually realizing that she never really wanted to be an actress after all. Here is how she told it to Riley at Backstage:

"I was doing nice guest shots on TV, but it just wasn't happening in a creative and fulfilling way," she says. "The roles I was up for—mostly mom roles—were dreary. And my enthusiasm for working on them and for auditions was very low." She had an epiphany. "Over the course of your life, you realize more and more who you are and how you want to spend your time," she reflects. "And it became clearer and clearer that I was very unhappy as an actress and didn't feel comfortable in my own skin. When I was younger I thought it was because I wasn't successful enough. But as I got older I realized it had more to do with the fact that I just didn't love it."

The two interview articles linked to above are great, and for another really great interview in which Salt discusses working with De Palma in depth, check out Cult Film Freak. The undated interview appears to be from around the late 2000's (maybe even 2009). When asked which of the directors she worked with provided the most freedom for an actor, Salt replies:

Without a doubt, Brian De Palma. Back in the late 60's and early 70's there was much more freedom in filmmaking. Brian was always experimenting with new ideas and wanted equal input from everyone. He was willing to hear and try nearly anything you could think of that might help. But I also worked on more than one film with him, so we trusted each other very much and over time we created a formula that worked between us. There was chemistry there by the time production began on Sisters. John [Schlesinger] was also equally open to ideas and he was focused on getting naturalness out of the performances of his actors. But during the duration of the shooting of Midnight Cowboy John was also battling some personal issues that often hampered the flow of the film's progress. Some of the best directors I have ever had the chance to work with were those in television. Many of them are now making theatrical films. There was at least back then much more room for improvisation in television than there is now.

When asked which of her roles she likes best, Salt replied:

I loved playing “Judy Bishop” [in Brian De Palma’s Hi Mom!]. Of course who wouldn't want to work with Bobby De Niro? Naturally back then he was pretty much an unknown, but I still can't believe I shared the screen at one time with him. Of course I still say “Grace Collier” [Sisters] is up there at the top of my short list as well.

WRIGHT HEADING TOWARD THE PURELY VISUALDIRECTOR INFLUENCED BY DE PALMA FOR BABY DRIVERWhile talking to The Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, director Edgar Wright mentioned that he is working on an original script that delves into the "purely visual" in a way a Brian De Palma film frequently does. According to Jagernauth, the script is called Baby Driver, and here is how Wright described it to him:

Well, it’s something I’ve been meaning to write for ages. I really planned to recharge my batteries and get back into writing. I’m excited about doing something that’s almost purely visual, because I’ve done three films—and even though Scott Pilgrim is very visual, it’s very dialogue heavy as well, which is great. And music heavy. Yeah. I think I’d like to try something—I’m a big Brian De Palma fan, and I’ll sit and look at something like "Carrie," and I like the fact that it starts to play out like a silent movie. There’s a point in "Carrie" in the last half hour where there’s no need for any more dialogue because the plot is in motion. Or something like [Jean-Pierre Melville's] "Le Samourai," I look at something like that and think, wow, there’s hardly any dialogue in this film. Something like that can be enjoyed around the world. I’d really like the challenge of doing something where the dialogue is really stripped back and it’s all about the cinema.

Elsewhere in the interview, Wright tells Jagernauth how he was originally not going to use much music at all in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, "because we saw that most fictional bands in films suck, and we thought we’d do a running joke on it." But as the music began coming in (from Beck and others), Wright started to see things differently:

I found out that once I had the songs, I allowed myself more time to let them breathe. So I think the first Sex Bob-Omb song, "Garbage Truck," maybe originally I thought they’d play the first verse and just before it kicked into the forest, [Matthew] Patel would interrupt, but then it was like, "no fuck it, let’s just listen to it." And when the songs started to expand, I thought, "wow, I’m really starting to get that vibe more like a sixties or seventies film." Some of those films like "Phantom of the Paradise" or "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," I would love it when they would go, "And now, the Strawberry Alarm Clock will play" or "Now The Carrie Nations will play" and it’d be like 10 minutes of the film. That was something that definitely developed once we had the material. I think in an early cut of the film, I think we played the whole of [Metric's] "Black Sheep." That’d be on the DVD, one version. In fact, when we shot the songs, we shot the full songs with all the artists, so we have different versions of them which we’ll put on the DVD.

In a separate interview with the Daily Comet's Dave Itzkoff, Wright again called out Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle and De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise as the "true antecedents" [Itzkoff's words] of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but said he was wary of citing those films in meetings with executives, because "you don’t want to reference things that are way too obscure.”

SCOTT PILGRIM REVIEWS COMING INMeanwhile, the reviews for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World are coming in as the film is released this Friday. Armond White at the New York Press loves the film, contrasting it with the work of one of his favorite targets, Quentin Tarantino. The latter's films, according to White, are "pop-referencing movies" that "extract all social and political contexts," while Wright's pop-referencing is done as "a social satirist."

At The Pacific Northwest Inlander, Ed Symkus writes in his review that "Wright keeps the film sprinting along, throwing in a split-screen segment here and an exciting rock performance there — with another super-stylized fight right around the corner. There turns out to be as much talk as there is action, and by the time we’re introduced to the (sorta) villainous Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman), the film has slickly turned into a diatribe against the cold, heartless record business. If you want to see anything remotely like it, check out Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise — a film that was as far ahead of its time for 1974 as Scott Pilgrim is for today."

Ving Rhames visited Lopez Tonight last week to promote his chainsaw-bearing role in the upcoming Piranha 3D, and mentioned a couple of things about the Mission: Impossible franchise. On the show, Rhames revealed that his character in the M:I films, Luther Stickell, was originally written to be one of the team members killed off in "the first six minutes" of the first film. "Now, I called Tom Cruise and Brian De Palma," Rhames told Lopez, "and I said, 'Why is it the black man dies in every action movie in the first six minutes?' Well, I'm about to do Mission: Impossible 4, so, uh, cha-ching and God bless." Since the Stickell character is a computer tech wiz, it seems likely he would have been essentially the one to die in the elevator shaft (that role ended up being played by Cruise's pal Emilio Estevez as an uncredited, and unadvertised, extended cameo-- people were surprised when the film began and the first real face they saw in color close-up on the big screen was Estevez'). Rhames had previously worked with De Palma when he portrayed Lt. Reilly in De Palma's Casualties Of War in 1989 (Mission: Impossible was released in 1996). If all goes as planned with the fourth installment, Rhames' Stickell will be the only character besides Cruise's Ethan Hunt to appear in all four M:I movies.

11:09 – I much prefer Cruise in one of those rubber face masks. I find his acting much more satisfying. Nothing too De Palma-y going on right now. Though the scenery looks an awful lot like the scenery in Phantom of the Paradise. Though like Emilio, I question Cruise’s decision to go with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. Very curious.